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Part Of Highly Anticipated ‘Its That Easy’ Campaign, Comedic Spot Highlights New Business Ventures From Retired Football Greats Brett Far...

Part Of Highly Anticipated ‘Its That Easy’ Campaign, Comedic Spot Highlights New Business Ventures From Retired Football Greats Brett Farve, Franco Harris, Emmitt Smith, Terrell Owens and more with a collection of great 2015 Super Bowl teaser ads.

Press:
Retirement is never an easy play for most professional athletes, but for ones with an entrepreneurial spirit like Brett Favre, Terrell Owens, Larry Allen, Franco Harris and Emmitt Smith it’s as exciting as their days on the gridiron. That’s the message behind web development platform Wix.com’s first-ever Super Bowl ad, created and produced by the recently-launched hybrid Committee LA.

The San Francisco-based creative team of Jeff Huggins and Andrea Janetos partnered with Committee LA founders directors Frank Samuel, Jeff Reed and Executive Producer Lauren Bayer on the :30 ad entitled “Wix Entrepreneurs.” The spot will appear during the fourth-quarter of Super Bowl XLIX on NBC February 1. Teaser ads featuring Owens and Smith debuted earlier this month on Wix’s YouTube channel, with more to come leading up to the big game.

The :30 ad opens with Favre meeting with his agent (played by actor Rex Lee, best known as Lloyd, the long-suffering assistant to agent Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage) to discuss his next career move. After Rex suggests he start a new business, we cut to a hilarious montage of new businesses founded by fellow former NFL-ers, including Smith’s Double Deuce nightclub, where he shows off the dance moves that won him first-place on “Dancing With The Stars,” and Owen’s ironically-named Humble Pie Bakery, among others. The spot ends with Favre launching Favre & Carve, a gourmet charcuterie (specializing in Cajun sausage, cured meats, and Wisconsin cheeses).

“Because Jeff, Lauren and I have long creative relationship this project came together in away that it might not have if we were working in a more traditional agency/production company role,” Samuel said. “Wix was looking for a creative idea and a unified production/creative team built specifically to deliver that idea – not an office full of account executives and cost consultants.”

Huggins, a 25-year advertising creative whose impressive resume includes stints at agencies Deutsch NY, J. Walter Thompson and Goodby Silverstein & Partners, notes the campaign is incredibly ambitious yet very much rooted in who Wix is as a brand and their core mission to support the entrepreneurial spirit.

“While the ad is about these specific business founded by former football players, the overarching concept centers on what every entrepreneur goes through when they decide to start a small business,” Huggins says. “Anyone with an entrepreneurial gene will relate to the challenge Emmitt, Franco and Brett face in the campaign, and the pressing business need to create a great website.”

Complex Production:
Samuel explained that creatively, the team began the production process by asking themselves what a new business really needs to get started – a website, local ads, online videos, a social media presence – and then went about creating that content.

“We wanted viewers to be unsure whether this was real or not,” Samuel notes. “We basically lived a year in the life of a five small businesses in about a month, taking each of these five businesses from initial concept to start-up launch. The ambition built into that is a testament to both Wix’s commitment to making this campaign memorable, and their trust in us to pull this whole campaign off.”

Samuel adds, that online spots for Terrell Owens’ Humble Pie bakery provide info where customers can order actual pies that come with an autographed photo of T.O.

To produce all of this challenging content, the Committee LA crew of 22 traveled first to New Orleans to shoot scenes with Favre and Lee, then crisscrossed the country to shoot the other talent, always working under enormous time and schedule constraints.

“This campaign has many legs thanks to all the content we created,” Bayer says, “and because all of that the content that is grounded in the players’ personalities there’s seemingly an infinite number of ways Wix can continue to roll this out and extend the campaign beyond the Super Bowl.”

Adds Huggins, “all the credit for this goes to the marketing team at Wix. They made a bet on an idea, and a unique collection of talented Individuals. They didn’t seek safety or cover inside a traditional agency model. Instead of complicating the process, they said ‘we love it, go do it.’ They were all in – and that says a lot about them as a company.”